Please read the "300ZX.CO.UK Club Announcement post" first.

 

Then to gauge the support for forming the 300ZX.CO.UK Club please make your mark here.

 

Comments, suggestions and ideas welcomed here.

 

-Andrew

It looks great, but I can't see how its different to how it is now apart from annual payment instead of one-off...

Care to enlighten me? :)

Great News! I think we should also get a deal on Insurance too, not to mention a few organised track days :D:D:D

 

Mike

Hi Andrew,nice to of met you at the weekend,great display of Zs was it not:) ,thanks for going around meeting members with details of the club formation.,I have only been a member myself for around 12 months and 300zx.co.uk has certainly grown and grown,i think that the formation of the Nissan 300zx Owners Cub UK is definitley the way forward,hopefully i see great times ahead for the club,Good luck,Tony:)

OK. As I dont own a Zed anymore I will be an Enthusiast! Which is great because I dont have to pay! BUT what will I loose out on by not being a member? If I loose out on not being able to park my car on the area designated for 300zx.co.uk at Billing (even though,I am a member, I have paid more than £20 as a jesture, I did have my name down as parking up as requested, I was told to bugger off by a Z Club prat! (terrible behaviour by a club member BAN HIM:D ) then like Clarkey said Whats the difference! I pay £10 to the Supra Forum, but at least I get some stickers!!!!!!

Nice to meet you Andrew, I find the proposals very interesting. Making 300zx.co.uk a formal club is definately the way forward :cool:

Dave

Yep, formal club would be good.

But my views on this have already been expressed in the Forum site and suggestions area.

 

I won't be voting until I know all the details.

I'm also holding off my vote.

Answers to Clarkey's Q would be good. And what I would want to know is WHY we are making the move. Not that I'm against it-as it seems a good step forward.

For £20 a year I would expect more than when I joined last year........which was ZIP, I did think something may have followed in the post.

Er... I can't ... I get a message about maybe not having permission.

 

So now the forum is broken as well as the Z! :-(

Will be holding my vote off until I know all the facts!

Also the not letting Roy in with our cars at Billing was a shambles IMHO,there were other cars parked with us last year!

Originally posted by MAC 1

Will be holding my vote off until I know all the facts!

Also the not letting Roy in with our cars at Billing was a shambles IMHO,there were other cars parked with us last year!

 

Agree with both points here .. particularly the part about Roy. He'd paid his 20 quid and had as much right to be there as anyone else, after all, it was a 300zx.co.uk stand not a Z32 stand. Surely if we're to be a club, including "enthusiast" members then they should be allowed on our "club" stand.

 

I think we should definitely allow any member to park on the stand next year, after all, I think we're all after being more of a fun club than an elitist one.

 

In fairness to whoever directed Roy off, the z-club had had to help martial our stand as our own martial (allegedly) was nowhere to be found ... I guess the z-club rep may not have known that Roy had booked a space.

 

CheerZ,

JB.

In principal I think it's a good idea but I have a question before I vote.

How will the subscription work? Will everyone need to pay £20 as soon as the official club is set up, or will exisitng subscribed members of the forum get their first year free?

I ask as I have only been a subscribed memeber for a few weeks and don't fancy shelling out another £20 in the near future.

Very much supported and long overdue. Thanks to the people who are putting their time in also as I know I for one wouldn't bother if it was me!

To answer some of the questions raised:

 

The start point for moving to a club was triggered primarily by Craig’s decision to take time out from the day to day running of the forum and wanting to hand responsibility to others he knew and trusted. The forum has now reached the size where it is too much for one person to manage and the load needs to be spread out. Rather than have an ad-hoc approach to running the forum we decided to form a recognized organizational structure called a Club.

 

Forming a Club gives benefits from two organizational points of view:

 

Firstly, running the organization as a club enables it to be recognized as an entity from a tax perspective. Money collected goes into a bank account in a clubs name rather than an individual’s name. We are moving the clubs funds currently with Lloyds TSB from Craig’s name to a new account in the club’s name.

 

Secondly, as a club we can get public liability insurance. As individuals we were (and still are as insurance hasn’t been taken out yet) at risk from legal proceedings from insurance companies or individuals suing to recover costs from such things as events organized on our forum where their insured party is involved in an accident. It is not fair to expect the individuals running the forum be exposed to that risk.

 

Another issue arises with libel. Libel is a very complicated part of the law. The general concept is that anything that cannot be proved by hard fact which could be considered damaging to a company or individual may be libelous. The individuals running the forum could be considered as publishers liable for libelous comments posted by users.

As a club we can, with published Acceptable Use Policies for the forums show a continued and consistent practice of due-diligence as a responsible organization. Being a club doesn’t remove the risk but does reduce it and is worthwhile.

 

The benefits to members of being a club is really up to what you want from the club. The ideas posted in the announcement gave ideas as to what the club could do. This is your club so decide what you would like to get out of it.

 

The level of subscription was kept at £20 mainly for consistency. Originally people chipped in £20 at Craig’s request. Since then new members have also paid £20. Today we have around 120 people who have paid up over the two years since we started to ask for subscriptions. The bank account stands today at £1,488. Anita (Ajay) will post a statement showing how the funds have been collected and spent on your behalf. We also have the services of an independent auditor to go over the books annually free of charge.

 

We get our hosting and bandwidth free of charge at the moment. This could change. If we had to pay commercial rates then would be looking at around £860 pa rising with bandwidth increases. It makes sense to budget for that contingency.

 

If we find that the actives we want from the club are at a level where we don’t need £20 pa subscription then we will scale it back. Let’s just get things up and running and see how we go.

 

-Andrew

Just thought I'd stick my oar in.. (finally, kept my trap shut all day at least :))

 

I've just (as of the weekend before last, in fact) stepped down as treasurer for the RTOC (That's the Renault Turbo Owners Club), and I've seen both sides of all this first hand before.

 

The club members inevitably, and regularily (and annoyingly.. ahem :D) asked where the money was going.. Everyone assumed we'd have close to £10k in the account (roughly 1100 members, each paying £10 p/a membership), and wanted to know how come we had run out of money (well, we hadn't, we'd simply planned the year right so that we used most, but not all, of our money!)..

 

Nobody realised how much all of our little costs added up - posting newsletters (£300 a time), membership packs (cards, keyrings, etc), stands at shows.. Everything added up..

 

And when you start organising events - then it really gets costly..

 

As an example, we hired Santa Pod for a day, this year, for our annual meet. We invited all the french car clubs (Saxo, etc etc).. And we lost £2000, because we 'only' had 500 people turn up, not the 600 we needed to break even.

 

The year before that we lost even more - the events organiser didn't invite any other clubs, so we hired a circuit (I forget where, ahem, bad memory! Somewhere oop norfish), and lost £3000 because only a couple of hundred people (out of 1100 remember) turned up..

 

We also get our hosting cheap (couple of hundred quid a year for probably more bandwidth than 300zx.co.uk sucks) because the host is an ex club member, so we don't have a great cost there either.

 

 

 

Anyway - all of that was simply meant to show that running a club is a surprisingly expensive business. And for a club with only a couple of hundred members, £20 a year will very quickly disappear once events and suchlike start being paid for (and even quicker if hosting has to be paid for at some point, and if the hardware isn't generously donated).

 

 

 

However.. I have one question, really. Personally, I voted no to this forum becoming a club because, quite simply, to me a club is more than just a forum. Especially one like this...

 

Does becoming a club mean there will be more (well, some!) moderation (ok, Fight Club being an exception, not that anyone really uses it!) - hopefully a fairly strict code of conduct for the forum and moderation that rigidly sticks to that?

 

I know that most likely nobody here will agree with me, but I for one very strongly hope that becomes the case - that we have a set of strict guidelines and rules, and the forums are moderated absolutely to those guidelines. (Anyone starting to think I'd fit in better on mkiv.net ? :))

 

As this forum stands, with the conduct on it, I don't believe it could be taken seriously as a club entity.

 

Just my 2p's worth.

 

[Don's flame retardant suit and runs for his life!]

 

Aaron

 

P.S. Please don't lynch me! And I do have a sense of humour, honestly...

REading Aarons and Andrews posts it seems like becoming a 'official club' instead of an unofficial club creates a lot more grief than it does benefits.

Aarons's perspective on this is interesting but as he points out, the scale of the RTOC is probably far in excess of what we shall ever see 300zx.co.uk becoming. I didn't really anticipate getting free track days and the like for my 20 quid and I'm sure that others don't have the same expectations.

 

The whole club ethos is about doing stuff together and furthering the interests of the members (be it organised group buys, insurance, social events etc..). I realise that we already do this to an extent, but as AndrewG points out, we really need to officially take on club status to enjoy the legal benefits...

 

I still think it's a good idea and we do need input from members as to what they would like to see more (or less!) of. This really is an opportunity to have a say in how we would all like the forum/club to move forward...

 

Cheerz

 

Steve

Hi Paul,

 

But is it fair that the people who run the forum may potentialy lose a lot of personal wealth through legal proceedings! That is one of the reasons why we are setting up as a club!

 

Guys,

Give us a little break here we are all trying to work for a positive outcome, we are not trying to fleece anybody!

 

The comittee who are mentioned in the list are people who Craig asked to help out when he was downsizing his role, literally a few months ago!

 

In this interim period of change between one person running the forum to a group there are going to be Hiccups, and understandbly as people who care about this forum you want to know what is happening!

 

But please take on board this is not a business, it is a group of individuals who are trying to help to run this forum in their spare time! We all want to have complete honesty and openess about what happens with everything in the club and hopefully eventually move to Electing members responsible for running the club and voting regarding major issues!

OK....Apologies for the delay, but I've had a bit of a hectic day today! :)

 

Forming a club would not lose the forum aspect, merely enhance it. The funds that we have coming in are utilised only for the benefit of the forum. A rough breakdown will follow in a minute.

 

If it ever gets to the stage where we have surplus that can be used for "whatever" then perhaps as has been suggested a tent for Billing and other major events and even beer and food to put in it for us all! More organisation of scheduled events, rather than the "Who fancies a meet at XXXX on Saturday?"

 

As it stands, should anyone have an accident at the aforementioned meet, 300ZX.CO.UK *could* be held liable. A club would enable us to have public insurance liability, to cover any such eventualities.

 

We need to look at membership packs and what would be good to receive within them. Non-internet users / low-internet users might appreciate a hard copy of upcoming meetings. Perhaps this could be an option on the application form...

 

Have to admit, as it stands currently, the forum is stagnant and many traders have simply refused to be associated with the forum for various reasons, but regardless of those, it reflects badly upon us all.

 

The forum needs a kick to get it going again (not in terms of activity, but to breathe life and change into it). To that purpose, we propose to introduce guidelines for Users and Moderators, built on discussion with the subscribed members and looking at how other forums / clubs have addressed this issue.

 

Also, more traders and insurance companies (for just 2 examples) are being approached and asked if they would like to organise group buys or discounts on products that would benefit the club.

 

Anyway, as I type this from my newly purchased holiday home in the Bahamas, I'd like to point out that I've only just been made Treasurer, so the following figures are inherited. :)

 

 

 

 

 

***********

 

Currently, we have approx 120 paid members, and about 10 more undeposited cheques since July.

 

There is £1488 in the account at present, as previously stated.

 

 

A rough breakdown of costs so far incurred is as follows :

 

Domain - £45/year for 4 years

Server Hardware (memory, hdd) - £120

Motherboard + processor - kindly donated

Case - £250

Billing - £65

VBB £70 approx

 

Total £685

 

There is a currently outstanding issue regarding approx £180 that is undergoing investigation and I don't think needs to be aired on the forum. It was not a decision made by the current moderators but we are trying to recoup the money and / or goods.

 

 

 

***********

 

This is a just a rough outline of where the money has gone based on the information that we have been given.

 

As of now, our accounts will be audited by an independant firm of accounts and will be published at the AGM and or in any newsletters that are produced.

 

Hope that this answers some questions...

Originally posted by AndrewG

If we find that the actives we want from the club are at a level where we don’t need £20 pa subscription then we will scale it back. Let’s just get things up and running and see how we go.

Would it not make more sense to decide what activities we want from the club now, *then* decide whether further subs are needed and, if so, how much?

 

If everyone knew what they were getting for their £20 (or whatever), it should make it a lot easier to persuade the waverers to pay up again.

That's what we're trying to do, Dave.

 

Currently we only have a few (percentage-wise) subscribed members. We need to work out figures for new suscribees, as well as work out how many renewals we'd get each year.

 

From that figure, we can then work out what we can provide.

 

 

It's all well and good saying that each subscribed member gets a free re-spray at PPS,(;)) but if we only have 2 new members and no old members renewing, that gives us £40. So where will the rest of the money come from?

 

We don't have all the answers to your questions. Some are simply a "time will tell" answer.

Just wanted to add that I wasn't trying to make it out like there are no advantages to being a club rather than just an internet forum - there are, not just for the owners and administrators of the forum/club from a legal standpoint.

 

And the point about money was just, really, to try and illustrate that while it's easy to think the money is frittered away, or sitting there unused, often it goes on a lot of things that never get thought about (other than by the people signing the cheques, of course :))

 

Sadly, I'm still not convinced that even with a code of conduct drawn up in conjunction with the members, this place could be taken seriously as a club by the community (and by that, I mean traders, show organisers etc). Not unless the administrators of the club are prepared to make hard decisions about the rules of conduct, that will quite likely annoy long standing members, at least. Which I imagine would just end up with said long standing members leaving.. Catch 22 I suppose.

 

Anyway, enough doom and gloom.. luckily, it aint me running it :) (Just thought I'd add that too - I'm not affiliated with the administrators of the forum/club at all, just a member like everyone else)

 

Aaron

The long term benefits of being a club easily outweigh any potential drawbacks. Traders, for all their talk, are primarily swayed by one thing, and thats spending power. They are liable to take ANY club seriously that has xx number of paid up members. And if xx is big enough, then after some sums, a membership card and some polite weasling, a club card starts to become a discount card. From such humble beginnings came Scoobynet's Scoobyshop.

 

Be a club. It'll be cool!

Originally posted by Ajay

From that figure, we can then work out what we can provide.

Hmm, so it's a chicken and egg scenario? :rolleyes: ;)

I tried hard not to reply because I hate being negative.

Reading between the lines it seems the £20 is to cover the legal aspects of being sued. I feel uncomfortable paying for the possibilty of other peoples stupidity, so I'm telling myself its just so I can talk to, help, and wind up people that I call good friends now on here.........and £20 is nothing to be able to do that.

 

(edit) I look forward to us moving onwards and upwards.

ok gets my vote now :D